Seems like so much net.art is about showing what you can do with the medium of the internet. I kinda like these vids, which are not just about using the net, but also a critical response to the aesthetics that comprise it.

Can you think of any other examples of using the medium of the net to comment critically on its structure/visual presence/psychic landscape?

Last week we talked about how technology can fracture your attention. But what about your sense of self? Humans have always tried to cram more personae into a single body, through the use of masks, costumes, role-playing, and story telling. Now, with homepages, personalizations galore, and profiles ad-nauseum, it can be hard to know exactly who you are…

Bill and Ted were slackers, rockstars, and eventually planetary saviors. Will your rockband’s path to stardom be most triumphant, or merely another bogus journey?

I often find myself with about a dozen tabs open. Sometimes some music will start playing and I can’t find the source of it…uber frustrating. I call this phenomenon tabsprawl. Today’s blog topic:

Technology mediates information. This can create focus, but more often, it seems to fragment attention. What are some positive and negative effects of this fragmentation? Do they reach beyond our interactions with computers? What are some examples?

“The Exquisite Corpse” originally refers to a word game played by the Surrealists (you know, Man Ray, Miro, etc.) in which a poem begun by one is continued by another, without knowing what came before. It is also a drawing game played under similar restraints – the first artist draws the head, folds the paper over to hide his drawing, then passes the page to be continued by the next artist. The process continues with the torso and legs, and when complete, the exquisite corpse is revealed, to the delight of all.

Continuing our journey through antiquity, we hit upon the story of the mechanical turk, a chess playing automaton peddled around the courts of Napoleon and other illustrious figures. Oh yeah, and it turns out that it wasn’t really a robot, just an elaborate simulacrum hiding a chess-playing midget.

Amazon’s Mechanical Turk website is another example of artificial artificial intelligence. You submit a task broken into manageable chunks and offer to pay a small amount for each chunk. Check out the students’ projects on their homepages.

Oops, looks like I’ve been asleep at the wheel. Here are a slew of posts from the last few classes…

We read Hans Christian Andersen’s The Nightingale and discussed notions of life v. nonlife, art v. artifice, and the virality of culture. Pretty profound insight into technology for someone born in 1805.

So we’re gearing up to make some creatures in Flash. This touches obliquely on the theme of artificial life, a topic we discussed earlier in reference to the Game of Life. In preperation for class, please view this talk discussing the relationship between genes (biological informational replicants) memes (semantic informational replicants) and temes (technological informational replicants). Also read Hans Christian Andersen’s Nightengale. Post a response to these memes (temes?) on your blog.

As the mashup-a-thon continues, we explore some techniques for interaction design development. Students proposed, outlined, and prototyped applications using 2D paper mockups, then taped a user test. Here’s one: